In-mold decorated thermoplastic films are gaining wide acceptance in applications such as household consumer electronics, appliances, and printed overlays. These applications demand a combination of properties such as clarity, printability, thermoformability, and hardness, as well as scratch, chemical, and impact resistance. This combination is not attainable with many materials of choice. The most common solution has been to apply a functional coating as a cap layer on thermoplastic films, wherein the coating offers the surface properties while the base film provides the bulk mechanical integrity. However, while a coating improves scratch resistance, it takes away the films thermoformability, which seriously restricts the useful applications for such a film. One of the most difficult challenges is the balance between scratch resistance and thermoformability remains.
Therefore, there remains a need in the art for multilayer sheets that can be easily formed, e.g., via coextrusion, and which provide the desired combination of properties, including thermoformability and scratch resistance.